Happy Summer Solstice to all those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and stand by to receive the baton of light and lengthening days down there in the Southern Hemisphere, though we'll keep it for a little while longer yet if you wouldn't mind. Summer hasn't really found its feet yet, more its flippers.
The fifth book...ah yes the fifth proof copy that has flown straight into my life, bypassing all the checks and balances and maybes. I've had to upgrade the house insurance and have been too scared to take it out with me because for sure someone will snatch it and run off with it. No it's not the next Hilary Mantel, I doubt I'll see that before publication date, and in fact I don't want to read it until everyone else does next March, but I'll be first in the queue in a real bookshop.
No, not our 'ilary but surely the next best thing is a new collection of writing from Kathleen Jamie.
I've worn my copies of Findings and Sightlines into well-thumbed very best friends. They are littered with marginalia and thoughts and journal entries of my own, I'm nigh on word -perfect.
That day in February when the light floods back...
The stroll through the whale hall, the Hvalsalen, when I measured out the length of a blue whale along the lane in front of the house...
'Still I walked on, counting until the spine ended. Fifty-seven paces. Less an animal, more a narrative. The ancient mariner.'
Three ways of looking at St Kilda and I still want to go...
Mapping the cells of Heliobacter pylori through a microscope...
' What vistas I'd seen. River deltas and marshes, peninsulas and atolls. The unseen landscapes within.
And Orkney, the visit to Maes Howe on the Shortest Day, just in case the sun might set through the tunnel...
I took Findings to Orkney with me three times, to read in situ and went on the pilgrimage to see for myself the whale's eardrum that Kathleen Jamie sees in Stromness Museum ...
The Tinker sat in an Orkney chair while I stared at this thing...
and then we both stared at the best scrimshaw ever and loved it...
On the 800 mile drive up from the Shire, on our first visit, the Tinker (my dad) and I had 'played' caravans. Kathleen Jamie says 'and what is a caravan if not a shieling hut on wheels.' We totted up the wheeled shielings, the Viking Marauders, the Unicorns, the Pageants.
We went to Skara Brae and I thought of Kathleen Jamie's words..how it re-calibrates your sense of time, the domestic normality of the late Stone Age...'beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads.'
And on our next visit, the one that I knew would be about storing up memories of the Tinker for my future self, when we were invited to go to the Royal Oak commemoration on Scapa Flow, we flew into Kirkwall on a tiny plane that my dad fondly named 'The Paraffin Budgie.'
He and I went into Maes Howe and he didn't want to leave, asked every conceivable question of the guide...
'Many visitors come crawling along the entrance tunnel to marvel at the tomb, and they breathe. The building wasn't designed to be breathed in and lit. It was designed to be dead in, and dark...'
The Tinker bought me a copy of The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown in the shop at Maes Howe. I've read it through and through and treasure it. And of course we went to 'the huge brooding stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar'
I read him some of Kathleen Jamie's Orkney observations and together we kept an eye out for the 'scraps of rainbow' that she mentions. 'There's one of Kathleen's scraps' my dad would say...
'Oh look, there's another one, a proper scrap that one...'
By accident the Tinker and I discovered Waulkmill Bay late one afternoon..
We were both transfixed by the peace and the beauty and, though I didn't say so at the time, I knew I had found the place where one day the family would scatter some of his ashes in the waters of Scapa Flow, and we did in 2016. Waulkmill is on Scapa Flow where my dad had been stationed as a fourteen-year-old boy bugler on the battleships in 1939. He felt an affinity and a connection with the place. It was something of a totemic place representing the loss of his teenage years spent doing his bit in the defence of the country. It seemed right that he'd be sailing in and out on the tide there. I think of it often.
I'm not sure that authors perhaps realise how important their words can be, or how they can creep into a reader's imagination, invested with their own personal resonances and lodge there, ready to surface when required, but both Kathleen Jamie's books have done that for me and I doubt I'm the only one. So how apt, in that case, that the new collection is titled Surfacing.
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie will be published in hardback in September 2019
'Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'.
In this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself.
Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.'
I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to sharing it all with you.
Meanwhile, have you read Findings and Sightlines...
If so please do share your thoughts in comments...
And if not you have two incredible treats awaiting to help pass the time until September.
Oh yes, and one more Kathleen Jamie-related thing...
I happened to catch this delightful programme on Radio 4 Extra yesterday. The Whitsun Weddings, first broadcast in 1999...
A verse drama by Kathleen Jamie, based on the poem by Philip Larkin.
On a Whit weekend at the end of the 1950s, Philip Larkin caught a train from Hull to London which was boarded by a number of newly-wed couples.
He turned his observations about them into one of his best-known poems.
40 years later, three of the couples and the daughter of the fourth look back on the day to consider if its promises have been fulfilled.
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